I cover technology, entrepreneurs, billionaires and VC's for Forbes. When I get the chance I write about lifestyle and booze too. Previously I edited Forbes's front-of-the-book section "Leaderboard," and was a proud member of the Forbes 400 Wealth Team. Before that I worked on Wall Street. Feel free to follow me on Twitter: stevenbertoni and subscribe to me on Facebook.

Carl Icahn’s offices carry a distinct museum quality. Three decades of scalps, resulting from some of the most famous hostile takeovers, proxy fights and board assaults in American financial history, cover every cranny of his wood-lined corridors. There are model airplanes from TWA–the takeover that cemented his name among major league dealmakers –and toy trains from ACF Industries, which has served as his cash machine for decades. Lucite tombstones recount conquests involving many of the great companies of the 20th century, from MGM to Motorola, Texaco to Nabisco.

Yet Icahn’s backward-looking perch, near the top of Manhattan’s old-school GM Building, has never been more relevant, as fortysomething billionaires like Michael Dell and Bill Ackman are learning to their chagrin. In the last 15 months the 77-year-old has taken positions in and then launched campaigns against 14 companies, a burst that has made him, at an age when he would have long been expected to fade away, the most disruptive individual in business, with a hand in almost every major corporate story in America.

One moment he’s launching a full-blown bid to snatch DellDell from its eponymous founder. The next he’s needling deepwater driller Transocean to pay out a gusher of a dividend. When there’s good news at Netflix, money managers shake their heads at Icahn’s timely investment. And if you stand in his way? His finger-prints were all over the resignation of Chesapeake EnergyChesapeake Energy‘s notorious Aubrey McClendon. Meanwhile, his live CNBC brawl with Ackman, who’s on the other side of his position in controversial vitamin company Herbalife, lit up trading floors around the world.

All of which leaves Icahn decidedly… relaxed. His face gives it away: He now sports a scholarly white beard, a by-product of a recent jaunt to Miami. And his demeanor backs it up: Icahn sold his 177-foot yacht because he got bored spending time on it; the investor has discovered that, for him, happiness means pursuing his activism actively.

“What else am I going to do?” Icahn asks rhetorically. “Sit at boring dinner parties?” He says this with a wave of the hand, leaning back in his chair. He’s a few days away from making an unsolicited bid for Dell, recently valued at $25 billion, offering to put up a $5 billion equity commitment funded almost completely out of his own pocket. Yet he’s as nonchalant as if he were mulling whether to help a buddy open a Dairy Queen franchise. Clad in a blue blazer with gold buttons, he calmly sips on a straw that delivers Coke from a crystal cup. “We’re at the top our game,” he says. “There’s never been a better time to do what we do.”

To be frank, though, what he does has changed. He used to make runs at companies via junk bonds and other tools of leverage. Then he figured out how to use other people’s money via a hedge fund structure. Now, though, it’s all Carl–with a net worth that FORBES estimates at $20 billion (which makes him the richest Wall Streeter, edging out George Soros). He doesn’t need anyone’s help or approval anymore. And that now makes him very, very dangerous.

“He loves winning, and he loves money–but it’s just a scorecard to show he’s recognized value and won,” says fellow finance billionaire Leon Black, who was Icahn’s investment banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s before cofounding private equity giant Apollo Global Management. “He is smart and unrelenting, he doesn’t care what other people think, and even though he is not always right, I would never bet against him.”

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Carl Icahn’s interest in Dell is as brilliant as his investment in XO Communications and Concentric Cloud Services. The real value in Dell is in its blade server business. If Dell restructures it’s enterprise business unit to focus on Data Center Virtualization solutions enabled by VMware, XEN, and, perhaps most importantly, OpenStack, sky’s the limit on future revenue growth for the company.

Dell would also be smart to partner with EMC and Netapp to develop pre-integrated data center solutions for commercial, mid-size, and enterprise customers who do not require super high-end, super high cost virtual data center tecnologies such as VMware Cisco EMC (VCE) vBlock data centers.

Thanks for reading. I agree it could be a very savvy move. Icahn thinks Dell’s $13.8 billion investment in cloud and enterprise business hasn’t hit the top line yet. If it does, Icahn is in for a big payday–that is, if he wins it.

I have the deepest respect for the plain spoken Carl Icahn. With humor and fond remembrance of some of the great Take-Over genius individuals, I had a vision. Carl Icahn in Jeans, t-shirt and sneakers next to Henry Kravis with his perfectly quaffed suit standing next to each other smiling! Two greats of that business!

jcgonzmo — thanks for your comment. I would not call Icahn hated. In fact I think he has a strong following on the Street–especially by shareholders in companies like CVR energy and Chesapeake, Icahn made them all a lot of money.

I love Icahn. He stands up for what is right. When Ackman, who is disseminating false information about a legitimate company – Herbalife, that sells real products to real people who love those products, just so he can cover his subpar track record and profit from his reckless short sale, Icahn brings true back. Ackman has blatantly manipulated the stock of Herbalife by having the attention of the media and knowingly giving false information just to drive the stock down. This is totally unethical. This is why I love Icahn because he sees the unjustice and is proceeding to right this injustice.

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I have never followed Icahn, or for that matter, any of the “take ‘em down and out” type of investors……until now. Article was very enjoyable, as well one of the previous reads offered on Icahn. Excellent portrayal of the “half-truths” common of the blood sucking and letting in Corporate America.

I think it is so funny when people write self righteous rants. You have it all figured out Kathy, right? Here is a little bit of reality for you to meditate on. These people are smarter than you will ever be in ten life times. Their deep intuition of commerce, business, and the movement of money eclipses your meager adolescent analysis of “how a money making enterprise should be run.” I would go to your column and pontificate about what kind of person you are, even though we’ve never met, but I found out that you weren’t important enough to have an article written about ‘you.’ Go figure. Get back to your dull unproductive life and stay out of business column with this garbage.

Someone had a bad day….I don’t see what was so self-righteous about Kathy’s comment. Icahn seem like a “cool guy” who’s out to make money in a way that makes money for the little guy too, but there are a lot of other investors of his type that are not nearly so saintly.

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I’ve never been a real fan of Dell but it’s a real shame its coming down to this. An LBO by Icahn or anyone else for that matter is a death knell for the company. How many people will be put out of work in the inevitable layoffs that will happen to help repay the debt incurred to buy out Dell? An LBO will simply accelerate the downward spiral that MD was trying to stop and reverse.

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